1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to an intelligent user interface apparatus and control method for the control of service robots, and, more particularly, to an intelligent user interface apparatus for the control of service robots which includes a user request analysis module for optimizing the interaction between a robot and a user and a module for numerically analyzing the degrees of satisfaction with services provided by the robot and feeding back analysis results to the user, and an intelligent user interface control method.
2. Description of the Related Art
With the progress of computing power to process a machine language and the improvement of a communication environment, research into service robot technology capable of assisting humans to do housework and improving convenience has been widely and actively carried out. Service robots are different from existing industrial robots which conduct standardized and repetitive work, in that the service robots coexist with humans in the same space and make continual relations with general users having no professional knowledge about robots. Accordingly, the importance of research into interfacing and interaction between humans and service robots has been increasing more and more.
Research into user interfacing was accelerated by an input device which appeared in the 1980s. A user interfacing method using a mouse which appeared in the 1980s brought about the transition from a keyboard and text-based computer user interface to a graphic user interface, which resulted in an innovation that enabled many people to use computers as convenient tools. This graphic user interfacing method has been applied to interfacing methods for industrial robots, and has been widely used in methods of interfacing between humans and robots in many fields up to now.
Since the mid-1990s, thanks to the rapid progress of communication technology and the persistent development of computing power, research into the role of robots transitioning from that of industrial robots which are assigned simple repetitive tasks by a few professionals and conduct the tasks to that of personal service robots which conduct the personal and convenience tasks of general users having no professional knowledge has been actively carried out up to now.
Currently, research into interfacing for personal service robots covers research into a variety of input methods using voices, gestures and/or keywords to improve users' convenience and research into communication and interaction structures for supporting the interaction between humans and robots. In particular, research into the interfacing between humans and robots is very important to robots which coexist with humans in the same space, and aims at implementing the human-friendly interaction based on the mutual reliability between humans and robots. Accordingly, the development of an interface capable of providing functionality of enabling a robot to accurately understand users' commands and increasing the degrees of satisfaction of the users so as to increase the reliability between humans and robots is in demand.